Since I started studying theology, I have known that I love morality and ethics, but I didn't realize until the beginning of last semester that virtue ethics is the only ethics that makes since to me. Don't get me wrong I still love Thomistic natural law theory, but it needs application and the best way see is virtue ethics which provides a way of living discipleship, which is more or less lost in Christianity today. You hear Christians talk about personal relationships with Christ, and accepting Him as your Lord and Savior, but very little about what that means for how a Christian should live her life. Being a Christian means imitating or following Christ. If we are to be followers or disciples of Christ we must follow the way He had set out for us, and to do so we must cultivate certain practices, virtues.
Virtues are basically good habits or dispositions that an individual develops through practice or repetition of acts of the virtue. In other words, to gain courage, we must act courageously. Virtues provide guidance as to how we are to
live in act, and they empower our practices that develop into out actions.
Virtues enable us to act in specific ways and they are dispositions that need
to be cultivated. While virtues develop and become ours by our practicing them,
not all virtues are habits we can come by naturally, they must be infused in
us. These infused dispositions are given to us by God and are thus called theological
virtues. The theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity (love). These
three virtues are the basis for an ethics of discipleship.
Faith, of course, is foundational. It is the basis for
Christian life and the development of hope and love. Faith of course leads to hope, if we believe in God we will have hope that what He has promised will be. Over and over in fundamental theology it was reiterated that the purpose of why we do theology is stated in 1 Peter 3:15, “Always be ready to give an account of your hope to those who demand it of you.” Part of how we can account for our hope is through our actions. Our response of faith to Jesus is to acknowledge
our encounter with him in our hearts, acknowledging Jesus with our heart is the
basis of conversion and living out discipleship. Merely confessing faith with
the lips is somewhat empty. Talk is cheap, and one's encounter with Jesus and having faith in
him means something for the way one is to live her life.
This is
what discipleship is, acknowledging God with your heart in faith and witnessing
to that faith through your actions. This is what faith should be for us today
too, it should be known through our actions and living of love for one another
than through the confession of our words. A person’s faith in Jesus necessarily
makes her member of the Christian community.
For Christians, hope is the trust in the promise
that God will bring to fruition what has been promised, namely, that if we
believe in God, we will have eternal life. Typically hope is understood as
focused on a future good. As a virtue, our hope should have implications
the way we live our life. That we are a people of hope as Christians should be
exemplified in our lives. How would anyone know we have hope if we are not
living it? Hope is
a necessary virtue to living in the face of adversity, the trust that what has
been promised will be fulfilled, and that by continuing to live our faith; we
can share in the fulfillment of the promise. Hope is the way we live our faith.
But hope is not only about when things are going well. We must also be able to account for our hope when we face adversity and challenges. If I cannot
account for my hope in light of my present situations, I cannot account for my
hope. Even when things are bleak, we should not lose hope.
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